ryancbriggs.net

The Zedillo Report

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:06:00 -0500

Two days ago I attended the Washington, DC launch of the World Bank’s report on internal governance, headed by former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. You can download the report here.

The executive summary does a good job overviewing the report and is quite readable, so I’ll only briefly mention a few of the key recommendations:

The World Bank Group’s Board should shrink from 25 to 20 chairs. European countries should give up 4 chairs in this process.
Voting power at the IBRD should be decoupled from IMF quotas and non-donor countries should have a larger share of voting power (ideally around 12%).
Approval of all financing should be transferred to management. As it stands now, the Board has a say in financing, which prevents the Board from providing impartial oversight. No one wants to say something is wrong if they are partially at fault.
The standard unwritten rule where a US national is always president of the World Bank and a European national is always managing director of the IMF should be abandoned.
The Board should have to produce an annual review of the performance of the World Bank president.

The launch event featured a panel discussion with president Zedillo, Nancy Birdsall, Moisés Naím, and Arvind Subramanian. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast Moisés and Arvind cut to the core problem with the report: implementation.

While Moisés frequently called the report the best document he has seen on World Bank governance in over 20 years, he also clearly thought the plan was not implementable. How exactly does one convince the European countries to give up 4 Board seats? How would Obama sell the US giving up its ‘right’ to the presidency of the World Bank to the American public? These are important questions that the report does not address, and the result is that the report ends up reading like a comprehensive wish list. The lack of focus on implementation is unfortunate because the plan itself really seems quite well put together.

Nancy defended the report, arguing that now that a plan exists activists can focus on pressing for change. I can’t help but side a little more with Moisés though. I’d rather have a less than ideal report that can be implemented than a perfect plan that gets filed away.

You can find more commentary on the report here and an interview with president Zedillo about the report here.

Best Flag Ever

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:07:00 -0400

That’s the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897. (via kottke & andre)

DC Dev

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:15:00 -0400

DC Dev is a calendar that Maya Berinzon and I made to aggregate development-related events in DC. The calendar is public and hosted on google. Editing requires authorization, but if you are interested in helping me update the calendar then please email me (this blog name @gmail.com) and I will give you permission.

You can find a webpage version of the calendar here.

You can subscribe to the calendar from a calendar application such as ical or windows calendar by pointing the calendar to this .ics file. (Note: clicking the link will just download the calendar, you want to subscribe to the link in you calendar application.)

Lee at Roving Bandit (probably the best economics blog in...

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:02:00 -0400

Lee at Roving Bandit (probably the best economics blog in Southern Sudan) pointed me to this wonderful heat map of population density in Africa. Click the picture to see maps from other decades going back to 1960.

The difference I mentioned before in population densities...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:35:00 -0400

The difference I mentioned before in population densities between Ethiopia and France is even more pronounced when Africa and Europe are compared instead of individual countries. By 2010 Africa surpasses Europe.

The data again comes from the UN and can be found here.

I’m rereading Herbst’s States and Power in Africa...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:18:50 -0400

I’m rereading Herbst’s States and Power in Africa (.pdf review here) and I started wondering how population densities in Africa and Europe compare today. Herbst makes the claim (I’m simplifying) that European and African political trajectories can be largely explained by differences in population densities. Herbst points out (in this chart) that African population density in 1975 roughly equaled European population density in 1500. The graph above shows that by 2010 Ethiopia will have surpassed France’s population density in 1950. That is quite the catch up.

I’m writing something on this and I’ll try to remember to post my thoughts as my writing progresses. Charles Kenny has a good explanation of the African population explosion and how it could happen without large amounts of economic growth.

The data comes from the UN and can be found here.

Listening to Development

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0400

Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages of the podcasts, but all of them can be found in iTunes as well.

Podcasts that are consistently good:

Development Drums, a podcast by Owen Barder on a wide variety of development issues. This is a must listen.
Africa today, BBC’s Monday to Friday summary of news about the continent.

One-off podcasts:

Even if you aren’t into economics, you should still listen to the Econ talk interview with Paul Collier about his recent book (see Chris Blattman talk about it here).
If you are into economics, then Econ Talk is great. I particularly enjoyed this interview with Peter Blair Henry on the relative importance of institutions and policies on growth.
Binyavanga Wainaina gave an interview to American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith on the ethics of aid (see Texas in Africa talk about it here).
[update: Sep 9, 2009] Terrence, pointed out that LSE’s Public Lectures and Events podcasts are often development related. I enjoyed Amartya Sen’s talk on The Idea of Justice.

Tangentially related video podcasts:

Tea with the Economist is not always about development but is consistently good. Of particular interest will be this interview with Michela Wrong.
TVO’s Big Ideas (audio or video) is also not about development but is often interesting. Readers might find Margaret MacMillan’s talk on her book Paris 1919 and Niall Ferguson’s talk on his book Empire particularly interesting (and controversial, in the case of Ferguson).
Finally, CSIS has occasionally interesting audio and video podcasts on Africa, global health, and trade and economics, among other topics.

I went to DC’s Eastern Market today and stumbled upon...

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:04:00 -0400

I went to DC’s Eastern Market today and stumbled upon this map of Africa from 1875 (just a few years before the scramble). I don’t know much about it, other than the date and that it was printed in the US (at the bottom the longitude is given relative to Washington) by Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co. Sorry that the scan is blurry on the sides, my little all-in-one scanner can’t fit the page and I don’t want to bend it.

Click the map for a larger version.

Theory Talks

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:32:43 -0400

If you are interested in the theoretical or methodological side of international relations then you should check out the interviews at Theory Talks. Run by Peer Schouten, the site currently hosts 32 interviews with top scholars in IR (broadly defined), including Alexander Wendt, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Robert Bates.

Thanks to Matto to pointing this site out to me.

RSS feeds for International Development Journals

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:55:18 -0400

Today Chris Albon posted a list top IR journals on his website War and Health. The list can be easily imported into a RSS feed reader. I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me before. Thank you again Chris.

I subscribed to his list, and then went about compiling a list of journals that would be of interest to most development academics. My list does not overlap with Chris’ list. Many people will want to download both. My list includes:

African Development Review
Development
Development in Practice
Development and Change
Development Policy Review
Governance
IDS Bulletin
Journal of Development Economics
Journal of International Development
Review of Development Economics
Third World Quarterly
World Development

You can download an .opml file of the list here. To add the file to your list of RSS feeds just open your feed reader, click import, and select the .opml file. If you are new to RSS you can check out Google’s free RSS feed reader.

Randomized Controlled Trials

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:57:00 -0400

Bill Easterly has a good post questioning the utility and ethics behind using randomized controlled testing to evaluate foreign aid interventions. His whole post is worth reading, but I want to elaborate on his second question, “Can you really generalize from one small experiment to conclude that something ‘works’?”

When it comes to aid the answer is pretty easy: no. There is a good reason for this, and it highlights one major difference between randomized controlled trials for aid and randomized controlled trials for medicine. First, the basics. A randomized trial is an experiment. In the experiment the researcher takes a sample from the population and divides the sample randomly into two groups, the control and the treatment. The experiment is set up so that the only systematic difference between the two groups is that the treatment groups gets the medicine and the control group doesn’t. The resulting difference between the two groups represents the effect of the medicine.

There is an obvious, but often overlooked, assumption at work here. The assumption is that the two groups that make up the sample are representative of the entire larger population. In the case of medicine, the control and the treatment groups are taken to be representative of the entire (much larger) target population for the medicine. The validity of RCTs for medicine hinges on this assumption being true. It usually is true because at a biological level most people are pretty much alike.

In political and social life this condition is rarely, if ever, met. A randomized trial in one country will tell you if the intervention worked in that specific place and time, but it will not tell you if the intervention works in general because different countries are far more different than different people. If tylenol works on someone in Botswana then it will probably work on someone in Vietnam. This is not true for aid interventions because the relevant social, political, and economic systems in any two countries are very different—far more so than the biological systems in different people. These systems also change rapidly when compared to human biology.

In short, an assumed equivalence between people underpins RCTs in medicine, but this equivalence is clearly lacking between countries. Because of this, RCTs can be used to see if an aid intervention worked, but it is impossible to use them to see if an intervention works. They are useful for small scale testing and can produce useful knowledge about what works in very specific contexts, but they cannot speak to anything larger. No one should expect them to do that.

—UPDATE: Jul 16, 2009—

Tim Ogden has a comment on Easterly’s blog that is worth highlighting. Here is an excerpt, “In fact, if you have a policy agenda, talking to Duflo, Kremer, Karlan et. al. can be maddening since it’s virtually impossible to get them to commit to a policy recommendation beyond the local context of an experiment they’ve run.” He is right, and I should have pointed out that the academics pushing RCTs for aid are well aware of the issues I raised in my post.

"Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than..."

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:30:38 -0400

“Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all this senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go.”

- E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.

The internet is like a big phone, right?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:16:00 -0400

About a week and a half ago the new Conservative party introduced a bill to modernize police power and internet interception rules in Canada (see more here). The bill is based on the assumption that the internet is analogous the phone system. On the program Search Engine Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan said, “What we did is we […] tried to find a way of modernizing and updating out laws on intercept technologies of the police, and we tried to create a regime for the cyber world, the internet world, that parallels as much and as closely as possible that which existed in law for the old world of the analog telephone and the single telephone company. We think we have done that.” I also think they have done that, and I think that it is a horrible idea.

The basic problem is that the internet is not like the telephone, so any system that tries to apply the same logic to both is bound to be incoherent. The basic idea behind the new legislation is that internet communication consists of a stream of data between two points, just like the phone system. Under the new bill, the police would not need a warrant to gather information about either end of the transmission—who you are, where you live, your phone number, etc.—but would need a warrant to know the content of the transmission. The is broadly similar to how phones taps are legislated.

The problem is that the internet is composed of many systems, and they are not all analogous to the phone system. First, we have email and instant messaging. This system is essentially equivalent to phones. Policing emails and instant messages in the same way as phones makes sense. If the police do not need a warrant to gather information on who is phoning to who, but they need one to know what people are talking about, then the law is consistent across phones and the internet. People may disagree with the outcome of the law, but it is consistent and Conservative policy is sound.

Unfortunately, there are other systems at work on the internet that are nothing like phones. This is common sense, but it seems the Conservatives missed it. Besides point-to-point messages like emails, the internet also operates like a giant library. People access information on webpages, and leave their IP address behind in records. Allowing the police to attach these IP address back to names without a warrant is exactly equivalent to letting the police connect library card numbers to names without a warrant. This represents a large expansion of police power.

The third, and most unique system, is that the internet allows anyone to create easily accessible information with minimal effort or expense. There is no good analogy for this kind of system, as it is probably represents the biggest technological and social shift that any of us will ever experience. Legislating this new form of information production as if it were a rotary phone is madness. This system is unique, and part of what makes it special is that people can produce information with a degree of anonymity that other previous information dissemination technologies lacked. Currently the veil of anonymity can be punctured, and this is a good thing. If someone breaks the law—by posting child pornography, to use the Conservative’s favourite example—then the police can get a warrant and learn that person’s identity. The key is that they need a warrant. This judicial check on police power allows all law abiding citizens to create and share information free from government control and snooping. This should be a small government, pro-private sector party’s dream. Apparently it isn’t.

When I think about this bill, I am only left with two options. Either the Conservatives are intentionally trying to vastly increase police power in Canada, or they are so dumb that they actually think that the internet is like a big system of rotary phones. Honestly, I don’t know which one is worse.

The NY Times Code

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:05:00 -0400

Today I am releasing the Processing code that I used for this map and these graphs, and the code that I used to get the data from the NY Times. To run the programs, (download Processing, then) unzip the programs and place them in your sketchbook folder.

The code used to gather data from the Times’ API can be found here. Jer has a great introduction to working with the Times’ API in Processing that is worth reading. In order to use my code (or Jer’s), you need to make an account with the NY Times and request an API key. This is painless and you can do it at developer.nytimes.com.

The code for the map program can be downloaded here. For this program I used an .svg map of Africa that I found on this wikipedia page. Wikipedia has lots of other .svg maps that you can use.

The code for the graphs is here. The bulk of this code comes from Ben Fry’s book Visualizing Data.* I lightly edited the code, wrapped it in loops, and made some changes to make it read my input and output image files.

If you need a general introduction to Processing the tutorials and reference sections of the Processing webpage are great, as is Casey Reas’ book Processing. Casey Reas and Ben Fry are the founders of Processing and I found both of their books very helpful.

All of the above code (except for the excerpts from Ben Fry’s book or Jer’s webpage) was written by a complete amateur and probably has lots of problems. My goal at the beginning of this project was to learn how to use Processing just well enough to solve my problems in the fastest amount of time possible. If that philosophy doesn’t appeal to you, then my code probably won’t either.

*Today I started using Amazon Affiliate links on books and media that I really like. I am hoping that this can help me buy more books that I really like. It also introduces a conflict of interest, so I felt that I should disclose it publicly.

The (delayed) NY Times Code

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:11:00 -0400

A few people have asked me where they can find the processing code that I used in my recent visualizations. Right now it is messy and incomplete and sitting on my desktop. It will stay there until I can clean it up. I’m aiming to have the code ready for public consumption before I travel to Chicago on June 18th.

Also, I am flattered by the positive response that the visualizations received. Thank you. It is really uplifting.

Archive of Accepted Proposals

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:35:03 -0400

I am thinking about writing up and publishing some short pieces that I have kicking around in my head, but most of my ideas are not rigorous (or long) enough for academic articles. I might be able to pitch these ideas to quality newspapers or magazines, but I have never pitched an article before and I don’t know where to start.

Anyone else in this situation should really check out Dan Baum’s archive of accepted article proposals. He has written for Wired, the LA Times, The New Yorker, and many others. His archive is proving invaluable for me. I hope you find it useful too.

Texas in Africa recently asked: If you took all the stories...

Fri, 29 May 2009 23:48:00 -0400

Texas in Africa recently asked:

If you took all the stories about African countries in American newspapers and removed those about poverty, disease, and war, I wonder what would be left?

I don’t have a perfect answer, but I can offer a tentative one. The New York Times tags all of its stories on a number of variables, including the article’s geographic subject and its relevant overarching themes. This information is free for people to play around with (do it). I modified one of the programs I used previously to find out what themes were prevalent when an article was about the continent of Africa. Two caveats:

These numbers are drawn from articles on the continent as a whole (as are the numbers for the graph above). Articles on specific countries or cities in Africa were not included unless wider Africa was an important part of the story.
Each article can be tagged as having more than one overarching theme. I wanted to show the data as a pie chart, but the non-exclusivity of the themes made that impossible.

With that out of the way, the juicy stuff:

16% of the articles on Africa in the New York Times between 1981 and 2008 were tagged as being about AIDS
12% were on foreign aid
5% were on famine
5% were on civil war and guerrilla warfare
4% were on immigration and refugees

Don’t add the the percentages up! Each bullet is true on its own but you can’t add the percentages and say that 42% were on stereotypical themes. There is likely overlap between the “immigration and refugees” category and the “civil war and guerilla warfare” category, for example. There were some more nebulous categories as well:

21% were on US International Relations or International Relations
11% were on economic conditions and trends
6% were tagged as being on third world and developing countries

As you can probably gather by now, the labeling system that the Times uses is a little opaque and can be hard to follow. I would not rely heavily on these numbers (only 6% were on developing countries?), but they do provide some insight into how Africa is portrayed in one major newspaper. Texas in Africa, that is the best I can do right now.

The picture above shows the New York Times coverage of nine...

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:17:00 -0400

The picture above shows the New York Times coverage of nine African countries from 1981 to 2008. You can click for a larger image. If you want to download the entire set of (much better quality) images, you can get them here. The set contains 48 pictures (continental Africa plus Madagascar) and a text file with some extra information and caveats.

I would love feedback, but I am not a fan of blog comments. You can reach me on twitter at @ryanbriggs.

—UPDATE: May 28, 2009 —

Andrew Hughey pointed out that I was missing some articles on the DRC because I forgot to includes those titled Zaire. The image for the DRC is now updated to reflect the additional articles, as is the map.

The New York Times’ API is really fantastic. —...

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:33:00 -0400

The New York Times’ API is really fantastic.

— Update: May 28, 2009 —

A point of comparison (requested by @theresac) is that in the same time period Canada had 10905 articles, Mexico had 10042, Germany had 10161, Norway had 1393, and Bangladesh had 900. I will soon upload the graphs of each country in Africa over time, as they show where coverage spiked. The point of the original exercise was to allow for comparisons within the continent (and to learn how to use processing), but if I find some extra time over the summer I might expand the project to the rest of the world.

— Update #2: May 28, 2009 —

Andrew Hughey pointed out that I was missing some articles from the DRC because I forgot to includes those titled Zaire. The map is now updated to reflect the additional articles.

I have been playing around with the New York Times API and...

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:15:00 -0400

I have been playing around with the New York Times API and Processing over the last few days for a project I am working on. I am looking at how the Times’ coverage of Africa has shifted from 1981 (the earliest date accessible by the API) to 2008. The picture above shows the (predictable) spike in the number of New York Times articles about Rwanda in 1994.

Expect more visualizations of Times data over the next few weeks as I wrap up the project. I didn’t find anything earth shattering, but having data to back up hunches is always nice. If anyone wants to learn how to use processing I can’t recommend Processing and Visualizing Data enough. Both were written by the people who created the Processing language. The picture that I made above draws heavily on code written by Ben (one of the creators) in an example in his book.

When everything is finished I will post the code and the final visualizations to this page.

A final note: if you are interested in the link between media attention and violence, you should check out this recent post from Alex de Walle on the SSRC webpage.